Social Media Strategy Before we start Before we

Social Media Strategy

Before we start. . . Before we start it’s important to establish where we are now. . . And to set up some metrics to measure our results. We’ll also look at our aims behind the campaign, and what we are trying to achieve. We’ll look at what platforms work best for particular brands or industries – and focus our efforts on these. We’ll also suggest ways of linking all of your media together to get the best impact for your campaign.

Measuring the results You’ll need to install some kind of analytics on your website – we suggest using Google Analytics which can be set up here: http: //www. google. com/analytics/ You’ll also need some kind of way of recording where people heard about you when you get a new lead – we suggest a spreadsheet for your prospects using Smartsheet that will also record all their details: http: //publish. smartsheet. com/4 de 69 ab 2 c 023 481 b 8 c 1 fc 9 de 4 e 4559 e 7 So – that done. . .

About the different platforms Users 1000 900 800 700 600 500 901 400 300 555 490 200 170 150 Google+ Linked. In 0 Facebook • • • Twitter You. Tube Facebook – 901 m users Twitter – 555 m users You. Tube – 490 m users Google+ - 170 m users Linked. In – 150 m users Pinterest – 11. 7 m users 11, 7 Pinterest

About the different platforms It’s clear from the graph above that Facebook has the most number of users. However, the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Facebook & You. Tube are mainly used for social purposes and therefore the impact of advertising or market there is limited, unless you are an entertainment brand. However, as You. Tube is owned by Google, posting videos has fantastic SEO impact. Google+ is generally used as a business tool and a “me too” social media platform. The numbers are somewhat misleading as everyone with a Gmail account automatically gets a Google+ account. Linked. In is very much an international networking tool – you’ll find it most useful when using the groups function or suggestions for connections. On Twitter it’s easy to search and “eavesdrop” on other’s conversations which makes it ideal for businesses. Beware of being labelled a spammer though! We’ll be concentrating on the most useful tools for business user: Facebook, Linked. In and Twitter. The newcomer to social media and with a heavy bias towards artistic and creative projects and a heavy female user base.

Where we are now: Questions Today: How many leads are you getting per month? Where are these leads coming from? Adverts/Google/Networking/Direct Mail/Exhibitions/referrals/etc. How many new clients do you get per month? How many hours do you spend on social media marketing per month? How many hours do you spend on traditional marketing per month? What spare capacity have you got to do more marketing? How much new work could you cope with? Ideally what sort of work would that be? The Business

Where we are now: The Website How many hits to website per month? Where is the traffic coming from: Organic Google/Direct traffic/Twitter/Facebook/Linked. In/ Google+/etc. How many leads are you getting per month from the website? How many new clients do you get per month from the website? Have you got built in SEO? Do you have a blog? How often do you update the blog/website? How many incoming links do you have to the website? Today:

Where we are now: Twitter How many followers do you have? How many people are you following? Frequency of posts per week? Time spent each week? What’s your Klout score? How many RTs have you had in the past week? How many leads are you getting per month from Twitter? How many new clients do you get per month from Twitter? Today:

Where we are now: Facebook Do you have a business page rather than a personal profile? Do you have a vanity URL? E. g. www. facebook. com/yourbusiness How many fans do you have? Frequency of posts per week? Time spent each week? How many leads are you getting per month from Facebook? How many new clients do you get per month from Facebook? Today:

Where we are now: Linked. In Do you have a business page & a personal profile? Have you fully listed all your jobs and added all your contacts? How many connections do you have? Do you have your connections divided into lists? (e. g. Friends, customers, people interested in Product X etc. ) What groups are you a member of? Time spent each week? How many leads are you getting per month from Linked. In? How many new clients do you get per month from Linked. In? Today:

Who do you want to target? Like all good marketing, social media identifies who is most likely to buy your brand what they like to do, where they go, who they listen to, when they are most receptive and why they buy. Let’s think about your prospects: Who is this person? q. What do they do? q. Where do they go? q. What books/magazines/forums/blogs do they read? q. What age are they? q. What sort of media do they use? q. What websites do they visit? q. What hobbies do they have? q. How much money do they have? q. Do they have staff who work for them? q. Where are they based? q. Why do they buy your product/service?

Who do you want to target? My ideal client. . . q. Male/Female? q. What social media do they use? q. Are they a B 2 B brand or a consumer brand? q. What other websites/blogs do they read? q. What age are they? q. What hobbies do they have? q. How much money do they have? q. Do they have staff who work for them? q. Where are they based? q. Why do they buy your product/service?

What if my target market is “everyone”? By targeting everyone, you are speaking to no-one – you want your message to appeal exactly to your target market so they are compelled to buy from you. It’s also cheaper and quicker to target a small, tightly focussed group of people. Think of this approach as using a sniper rifle rather than a machine gun! For example, if you were launching a soft drink, instead of targeting “everyone” you might focus on marketing to mums of schoolkids. You can always go back and repeat the exercise to build up a number of niches once you have one underway.

Which social media Picking the right social media will depend hugely on their profile – what platform are they most likely to engage in? You can always test the water with some duplicate posts on all platforms and see which gets the best results initially. For example, as a VA business selling to other businesses, we posted the exact same content on our blog, Facebook and Twitter and got the most visitors from Twitter, followed closely by organic SEO to the blog, and lastly Facebook. Therefore we concentrated our efforts on Twitter and the blog. A client of us runs a club night and we ran the same test and got all his clicks from Facebook, with hardly any coming from organic SEO or Twitter. So you must match your media platform to your target market.

Strategy There are various strategies you can implement to leverage social media in your business: Awareness Relationships Sales Often the goal won’t be just to increase your sales, but to improve your brand in the marketplace, and therefore it’s sometimes hard to quantify the effectiveness of social media as a marketing strategy. According to the 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 78% of marketers saw increased traffic with just six hours a week invested in social media.

Strategy Relationships Track engagement and influence using tracking such as Klout. Awareness Measure how many people are watching your updates. Sales Look at click thru rates/subscriptions. Check uplift in sales. Engage with your followers & reach out to new ones. Measure how many people are talking about your posts. Let people get to know you. Build authority. Look at converting from passive to active subscriptions. We believe the best ratio is: 3 : 2 : 1 Relationships Awareness Sales For every 3 relationship building tweets, you can do 2 awareness tweets and 1 sales tweet. This ratio will create the best results.

What to talk about? Relationships Connect with other users. Awareness Post useful articles. Run competitions. Repost other people’s updates. Use direct messaging or private messaging to connect. Use #tags to connect with other groups. Create snappy interesting posts. Sales Make sure you aren’t tracking competitors or non-clients clicking thru to your website. Check who is following you and contact them directly to follow up. Make sure all communications are monitored and responded to. Our goal is to keep the tweets in the preferred ratio: 3: 2: 1 So your mixture might be: • RT@widgetmaker: How to build fantastic widgets www. link. com • Free report on how to get the best from your widgets www. link. com • What’s everyone loving about the new Widget 2000? • How my widgets won my cat a gold medal! www. link. com • Looking for widgets? Click here: www. link. com • @widgetlover: How’s things today? Note there is only 1 sales tweet in amongst tweets that connect with other users and build authority. Your aim is to provide useful information so people read your tweets and keep you in their stream of consciousness.

Get started. . . Now you’ve decided what mix you are going to use, integrate it into your marketing. Add “share this” links to your website, include your social media accounts on email and forum signatures, make sure your social media accounts are listed on your contact details on the website. Set up tracking – have your web designer install Google Analytics (or similar) on your site to track click thrus from the various different media. Decide who is doing what and when – if you are delegating your social media to members of staff or an outside agency, make sure you put a social media policy in place. Create a calendar of marketing including all your social media activity.

Social Media Policy You’ll need to tell staff about your expectations on using social media in the business – it avoids any misunderstandings further down the line. Like internet usage, it must be clearly outlined what is and isn’t acceptable in your own workplace. Notes: If there is anything you don’t want posted, or if there is a foreseeable situation where your networkers would need guidance, spell it out in your Social Media Policy. Use the following as a template to build your own policy document, have it signed and dated by all employees authorised to update your networks.

Social Media Policy Template Social media is now part of everyday life, but we want to ensure that it is always treated with the same degree of care that we would use when releasing any sort of PR to a newspaper or other media outlet in order to avoid negative publicity, maintain confidentiality and uphold the ethos of our brand. The following policy is designed to give staff guidance about accessing and posting to social media sites, but is not an exhaustive guide and where no guidelines exist, you should use your professional judgement and/or consult with your manager or supervisor for guidance. Personal Use: Please refer to your employee handbook on our personal use of websites and confidentiality. You should ensure that personal social media accounts have a clear disclaimer that they represent your own views and that you are not writing on behalf of the company. Confidentiality, data protection and copyright laws apply to anything which you post, including information which you may have access to as part of your job. Breaches of confidentiality will result in disciplinary action and may result in termination of your contract. You should maintain a professional approach towards (but not limited to): the company, your colleagues, clients, other agencies and suppliers who we work with. Any disrespectful or libellous comments may result in disciplinary action and/or termination of your contract. Logos/trademarks may not be used without written consent. When posting on our behalf: All official social media accounts should be set up with written permission from [SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER] and you should forward them the username, password, email address and profile page of the account which you have created so it can be stored centrally. Only authorised people may post from these accounts. All information posted must comply with our confidentiality policies. This includes (but is not limited to) client confidentiality, proprietary information which you may have access to as part of your job, and video or photos of the office or your working environment. Copyright laws must be complied with including using images, music or photos in any online content. At all times: Remember that you are representing the company. SIGNED BY: DATE:

Social Media Marketing Plan On this plan you can see the activities planned monthly and integrating with other promotional activities: Marketing Activity Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Winter Warmer widgets Valentines Widgets Pop up sale Blog on finding the right widget Exhibiting at Widget. Fest 2013 Email to Widget Fest Participants 23 rd Summer holiday widgets Back to school Widget Competition Halloween Widgets Xmas Special Deals Use this blank template to plan out your year and marketing activities – aim for at least one per month: Marketing Activity Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

A note on tracking. . . I had a beautician client who couldn’t understand why she wasn’t making any sales when her social media was performing so well. . . We had a brief look at her accounts and pinpointed the problem: most of her followers and fans were other beauticians, clicking through to see what the competition was up to! Whilst it’s great to have a supportive atmosphere for your industry, you need to discount the clicks you are getting from people who aren’t going to buy from you. The easiest way of doing that is by blocking them from seeing your posts in the first place – they will still be able to see them on your public page, but it won’t appear in their feed.

What we’ll do: The key to any media campaign is consistency. Here are some suggestions as to how you can tailor your activities to increasing your social media presence: • Post once per week to our blog. Post 3 x per day on Twitter. Update our Facebook Company Page with history of the company. Ask a question each Thursday afternoon on Twitter. Post to our Linked. In group each Tuesday morning. Put all my former companies on my profile in Linked. In and connect with suggested contacts. Review all my Twitter friends and DM one per day. • • Add yours here. . . _________________________________________________ _________________________________________________ • • •

Tools to help • Wordpress: You can preschedule blog posts on here. Great for competitions, getting comments, creating new content for SEO. • Hootsuite: Can preschedule and manage Linked. In, Facebook, G+ and Twitter from here. It has a bulk upload option too. • ifttt. com: If this then that. . . Another automation tool, more triggers and interesting applications including weather triggers, RSS feeds, etc. • Friendor. Follow. com: Check who isn’t following you back, download a list in Excel format. • Smartsourcing: We use this to find out contact details for as little as 0. 05$ a lead.

The results: Questions Now: How many leads are you getting per month? Where are these leads coming from? Adverts/Google/Networking/Direct Mail/Exhibitions/referrals/etc. How many new clients do you get per month? How many hours do you spend on social media marketing per month? How many hours do you spend on traditional marketing per month? What spare capacity have you got to do more marketing? How much new work could you cope with? Ideally what sort of work would that be? The Business

The results: The Website How many hits to website per month? Where is the traffic coming from: Organic Google/Direct traffic/Twitter/Facebook/Linked. In/ Google+/etc. How many leads are you getting per month from the website? How many new clients do you get per month from the website? Have you got built in SEO? Do you have a blog? How often do you update the blog/website? How many incoming links do you have to the website? Now:

The results: Twitter How many followers do you have? How many people are you following? Frequency of posts per week? Time spent each week? What’s your Klout score? How many RTs have you had in the past week? How many leads are you getting per month from Twitter? How many new clients do you get per month from Twitter? Now:

The results: Facebook Do you have a business page rather than a personal profile? Do you have a vanity URL? E. g. www. facebook. com/yourbusiness How many fans do you have? Frequency of posts per week? Time spent each week? How many leads are you getting per month from Facebook? How many new clients do you get per month from Facebook? Now:

The results: Linked. In Do you have a business page & a personal profile? Have you fully listed all your jobs and added all your contacts? How many connections do you have? Do you have your connections divided into lists? (e. g. Friends, customers, people interested in Product X etc. ) What groups are you a member of? Time spent each week? How many leads are you getting per month from Linked. In? How many new clients do you get per month from Linked. In? Now: